Kelly’s Uncle Wes, who long-time LCRW readers may remember as the author of an oatmeal cookie recipe a while back, just had has his first book published and even though it’s full of great stories it’s in a very different section of the bookstore than Kelly’s books!

Dr. Wesley Jones, to give him his full title, believes most people in the USA (and Western world) eat too much refined food and need more fiber. Here’s his bio:

He is the founder and senior partner of the Cape Fear Center for Digestive Diseases in Pennsylvania. He is chair of Curamericas Global, Inc., which provides healthcare to Central America, South America, and west African communities. He was awarded the FACP and AGAF awards for his work in the field.

Having trouble posting the final cover of Vincent McCaffrey’s debut novel, Hound, which is at the printer now. Dur. Will do it later. In the meantime, Vince will be getting out from Avenue Victor Hugo Books for a couple of readings soon. A few more may yet be lined up as this bookselling mystery gets more and more love from the bookselling brethren. Stop in and say hi here:

IndieBound is working the social web more and more. They have a new feature on Twitter:

Ask Indie Booksellers on Twitter anything you want to know! Go to AskIndies and the #AskIndies hashtag and a link to your book will be added for you automatically.”

* Alan’s first novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less, is out coming out later this year and it’s a mind-blowing experience. In some way it’s part of the whole post-apocalyptic group of books which sometimes seems like an admission that the author can’t imagine the future and has written a pre-historical novel masquerading as a post-historical novel; except this way they don’t have to research the past, either. But with Total Oblivion, while the past has invaded the present, this is in no way the past: it’s a lightly-outlined changed world where a teenage girl and her family embark on one of the ur-American stories: a trip down the Mississippi. More on it later — and it has a great cover which isn’t showing there yet — but add it to your wishlist now.

Kelly’s latest story, “Secret Identity,” can be found in Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci’s excellent new anthology Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd. For bonus points, see if you can spot Kelly (and some of the other writers) on the cover.

There’s nothing else coming out for a bit, but there are a lot of single stories floating around. Previous to Geektastic, “The Cinderella Game” came out this spring in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales—which was just picked as a read of the month, or some such thing, on Salon.

Over in the UK, Canongate have a different idea of the perfect Halloween read: they are buying UK rights to Pretty Monsters and will publish it in paperback on October 15, just in time for those who might want to read “Monster” or “The Wrong Grave” on the scariest night of the year. Canongate put out some really wonderful books — such as Ali Smith’s Boy Meets Girl and (maybe, not read it yet) Michel Faber’s The Fire Gospel — and Kelly is thrilled. Yay! Some readers no doubt read the US edition (which won’t be out in paperback until June 2010) but for a lot of readers this will be the first time they’ve seen the excellent cover to the right there.

Francis Bickmore, senior editor at Canongate, has acquired UK rights to Link’s Pretty Monsters for an undisclosed sum…. Bickmore said: “I’m over the moon that we have lured the maverick literary genius that is Kelly Link to our list, just in time for Hallowe’en. She is one of the best kept secrets of modern writing.”

Also in the UK, a little while ago Sarah Waters had a piece in the Graniaud about ghosts and writing her latest novel and gave us a thrill by including one of Kelly’s stories in her list of ten best ghost stories — along with some of Kelly’s own favorite ghost stories, “The Woman in Black,” “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and so on.

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link
All of Link’s stories are wonderfully odd and original. Some are also quite scary – and this, from her collection Stranger Things Happen, is very scary indeed. It’s the story of 10-year-old twin girls in a haunted American mansion, being instructed by an enigmatic babysitter just what it means to be “dead”.

Meanwhile in Australia, Text are splitting Pretty Monsters into 2 paperbacks and we just got copies of the first one, The Wrong Grave, and it is beautiful. The cover is marbled with silhouettes of crows and beetles and a stag — and they are carried over into the front matter. The second volume comes out later. It’s very exciting to think that it will be piled up in some of the great bookshops we visited in 2006 when Kelly taught at Clarion South: Pulp Fiction and Infinitas in Brisbane and Galaxy in Sydney.

“Deniro’s greatest gifts are those of a poet, and his prose is filled with stunning images and incantatory rhythms. Debuts often come along with press releases touting them as “assured,” and sure enough, Deniro’s was no different. But with talent as deep as his, it’s no wonder Deniro is confident in touring us around his strange worlds.”
–Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

“Maybe the future of sf is Alan DeNiro. The title story here, set in twenty-third-century Pennsylvania, is its nameless-till-the-last-sentence narrator’s university-application essay, numbered footnotes and all, which explains why not to expect him on campus anytime soon; he is in love and considering getting gills. Maybe DeNiro is the future of alternate history: in “Our Byzantium,” a college town is invaded by horse-and-chariot-led soldiers who demolish cars, wheelchairs, and other machines; reestablish Greek as the lingua franca; and otherwise conquer. He could be fantasy’s tomorrow, too, if the offhandedness of the impossible transformations in “The Cuttlefish,” “The Centaur,” “The Excavation,” and “If I Leap” catches on. In “The Fourth” and “A Keeper,” DeNiro is one of the most powerful, least partisan prophets of consumerist totalitarianism. “Salting the Map” confounds the distinction between artifice and reality as deftly and daftly as Andrew Crumey’s Pfitz (1997) and Zoran Zivkovic’s Impossible Stories (2006). The long closer, “Home of the,” about Erie, Pennsylvania, now and then, is as laconic and associative as its title is elliptic. Refreshing, imaginative, funny-scary stuff.”
— Ray Olson, Booklist

“A commitment to experimental structure and oddball elements provides this debut collection’s consistency…. The collection argues for DeNiro as a writer to watch.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Many of these stories unfold like dreams, startling in their detail but elusive in their meaning. Yet, the prosaic as well as the poetic features in these stories as characters attempt to create a detailed but incomplete record, like a dream book of their own histories. Objects such as a college entrance essay, maps, postcards, outdated computer disks, the provenance of a chess set, all become documents which convey the fragility of histories”— Greenman Review

Advance Readers say:

“Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is a thrill ride. Men jump from buildings and walk away, Assassins are hired to murder novels, Byzantines spring from the hills and sack college towns. On each page Alan DeNiro performs feats of acrobatic skill, holding the edge with remarkable control. He has created a brand new world, and I believe every word of it.”
— Hannah Tinti (Animal Crackers)

“I’m not ordinarily an editor, so finding stories for the first six issues of Fence magazine was a guilty pleasure, and the subsequent work by formerly unknown Fence writers like Kelly Link and Julia Slavin has made me look like a prognosticator, or maybe an annoying drunk guy on a streak at a casino. Speaking of casino, I know an online casino where you can win instant prizes, the site is called “dreamjackpot.com.” Now here’s Alan DeNiro, whose “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” was always my favorite. I’m thrilled to see him in bookstores at last.”
— Jonathan Lethem (Fortress of Solitude)

“Alan DeNiro’s stories move in unexpected ways into unexpected places — up in the air, under the water, out of this world. He has a gift for precise language and poetic logic, his own unique sort of circus realism. Sharp, smart, and completely original, this is a lively, lovely collection from a memorable talent.”
— Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)

“Reading Alan DeNiro’s new collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, made me feel like a dog that twists its head a bit to the side on hearing a whistle too high for humans to hear. The dog is perplexed and intrigued by the sound — it knows where it’s coming from but not really. Familiar enough, but maybe not. So too with these strong, out of kilter stories. DeNiro blows his own distinctly different sounding whistle and once you’ve heard it, you can’t help but stop and take real notice.”
— Jonathan Carroll (Glass Soup)

“The wholly original, carefully crafted tales that comprise Alan Deniro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead are like colorful pinatas full of live scorpions — playful, unexpected, and deadly serious.”
— Jeffrey Ford (The Girl in the Glass)

Easthampton is having an artbear invasion and it is really cheery to look down from the 11.05 morning zeppelin ride into the office (can’t quite get there for elevensies) and see all the people taking their pictures, reading the signs, sitting on their knees, and so on. They’re really well done—although don’t think we will get one for the office at the auction. Who’d a thunk they’d be so popular?

“Thirty years ago, Cassandra Neary’s grim photos of punks and corpses briefly made her the toast of the downtown art scene. Now an alcoholic wage slave, Neary accepts a magazine assignment to interview one of her reclusive photographer heroes on a Maine island, where a rash of missing-teenager cases and an off-kilter populace grab her attention. It takes time to warm to the self-destructive, sour-tempered protagonist –she drives drunk, pops Adderall and Percocet, and generally tries to not stick out her neck. Luckily, Hand’s terse but transporting prose keeps the reader turning pages until Neary’s gritty charm does, finally, shine through.” (B)
— Entertainment Weekly

“This novel disturbs like Cass’s photos of dead junkies and squalid club scenes. While in some ways she’s just another self-destructive person, Cass’s intelligence and talent make her an appealing mess. Hand propels this oddly appealing character through an old-fashioned mystery-thriller with stirring results. In the end, Generation Loss is a conventional story of sin and redemption. With darkly inventive polish, Hand reveals a character so deeply disordered, she’s both unlikable and compelling.”
—Time Out Chicago

“Cass is a marvel, someone with whom we take the difficult journey toward delayed adulthood, wishing her encouragement despite grave odds.”
— Los Angeles Times

“This smart, dark, literary thriller will keep you up at night. A photographer who has been drinking, doing drugs, and alienating everyone around her since the ’70s goes to Maine to interview a legendary photographer and gets caught up in the case of a missing girl.”
— Megan Sullivan’s Pick of the Week at the Boston Globe

“This long-awaited fantasy novel brings an end to the critically acclaimed Aegypt quartet that takes ‘the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books – and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility….gracefully written, beautifully characterized, moving, and thought-provoking…. [Graham Sleight]'”
— Locus Notable Books

“Just as lives that are only momentarily brilliant deserve celebration and respect, though, so do such novels, because life is dark enough that we need whatever illumination we can get, and there’s plenty to be had in Generation Loss.”
— Strange Horizons

“A formerly famous punk photographer attracted to the dead and damaged stumbles on a serial killer case when she takes a job inteviewing a famous reclusive photographer in this dark thriller of art and damaged souls, and despite only a hint of the supernatural, ‘…something of a departure for the author, but fully as elegant and significant as her overtly fantastic works. There is grave beauty her, and great thematic power.’ [Nick Gevers]”
— Valley Advocate

“Hand (Mortal Love, Black Light) expertly ratchets up the suspense until it’s at the level of a high-pitched scream near novel’s end.”
— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Ægypt is a metamorphosis, a metensomatosis, a memory play and a meta-novel; a story about many stories, a book with a larger book inside it. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
— Elizabeth Hand, F&SF

“Cass Neary, Elizabeth Hand’s unlikely heroine in her latest novel Generation Loss, may be hard to like, but I found her story is easy to love.”
— Feminist Review

“The novel crackles with energy: it is alive.”
— Nicholas Rombes, (The Ramones and New Punk Cinema)

“Intense and atmospheric, Generation Loss is an inventive brew of postpunk attitude and dark mystery. Elizabeth Hand writes with craftsmanship and passion.”
— George Pelecanos

“Lucid and beautifully rendered. Great, unforgiving wilderness, a vanished teenager, an excellent villain, and an obsession with art that shades into death: what else do you need? An excellent book.”
— Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain

Delia Sherman considers herself a “recovering academic.” She got her PhD in Renaissance Studies and taught at Boston University and Northeastern, during which time she wrote her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror. She left the academy in 1993 to write and edit full time, co-editing anthologies of science fiction and fantasy with Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner and serving as a consulting editor at Tor Books. Her other adult novels are The Porcelain Doveand The Fall of the Kings, written with partner Ellen Kushner. In 2006, Viking published her first novel for young readers, Changeling. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in The Faery Reel, Salon Fantastique, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Coyote Road, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. She satisfies her continuing desire to teach by serving as an instructor at various writing workshops in the U.S. and Europe, including Odyssey, Wiscon, and Clarion. A founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.

Theodora Gosswas born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is completing a PhD in English literature at Boston University, where she teaches classes on fantasy and the gothic. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, was published in 2006 by Prime Books. She lives in Boston with her husband Kendrick and daughter Ophelia.

About the Contributors

Karen Jordan Allen spent her mostly happy childhood in rural Indiana. She now lives in Maine with her husband and daughter, a cat, and a rabbit. Her fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Century, A Nightmare’s Dozen, Bruce Coville’s Strange Worlds, Black Gate, First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age, and Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Christopher Barzak spent two years in Japan, teaching English in a suburb of Tokyo, and returned home to Youngstown, Ohio last year. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in August 2007.

K. Tempest Bradford is an Ohio native and alumna of the Clarion West and Online Writing Workshops. She currently lives in New York City (at the very tip-top with the ravens). She spends most of her time trying to find a place with free tea and Internet where she can write.

Matthew Cheney’s work has appeared in One Story, Locus, Web Conjunctions, Rain Taxi, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His weblog, The Mumpsimus, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2005, and he is the series editor for the annual Best American Fantasyanthology from Prime Books.

Michael J. DeLuca would like to tell you he lives in a cave in Western MA, pronouncing false prophecy in exchange for such essential sustenance as food, water and wireless internet. Unfortunately such caves are few and far between, and often occupied by fearsome squatters, so he advises that you not go looking for him and visit his website instead.

Adrián Ferrero was born in La Plata (República Argentina) and attended the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he is currently doing his PhD. He has published academic articles in compiled editions and journals in his country, the U.S.A., France, Germany, and Spain. Fiction publications include Verse, a collection of short stories, and Cantares, a book of poetry. He is also co-editor of the digital magazine on creative writing Diagonautas.

Colin Greenland is English: born in Dover, educated at Oxford, with homes in Cambridge and the Peak District. His books include Finding Helen and the space opera trilogy that began with the multi-award winning Take Back Plenty. He lives with Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Csilla Kleinheincz is a Hungarian-Vietnamese fantasy writer living in Erkel, Hungary. Besides translating classics of fantasy, such as Peter S. Beagle’s works, she works as an editor at Delta Vision, a major Hungarian fantasy publisher. Her first novel, published in 2005, and most of her short stories are part of Hungarian slipstream literature.

Joy Marchandlives in a lopsided, historic rowhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the last two years she’s shifted her focus from short stories to longer works, and she’s currently writing a series of linked urban legends for her interstitial novel-within-a-novel set in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas. .

Holly Phillips is the author of the award-winning story collection In the Palace of Repose. She lives in the mountains of western Canada.

Rachel Pollack is the author of 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the award-winning novels Unquenchable Fire and Godmother Night. She is also a poet and a visual artist, creator of the Shining Tribe Tarot deck. She lives online and offline in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Veronica Schanoes is a writer and a scholar with a particular interest in fairy tales and genre theory. Her work has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Endicott Studio, and Jabberwocky.

Léa Silhol was born in Africa and grew up in Europe, but considers herself a “citizen of the world.” She is considered one of the leading writers in fantasy in the French language, with four short stories collections and a novel, La Sève et le Givre, which won the Fantasy Merlin Award in 2003.

Jon Singer grew up in Brooklyn, NY, wanting to be a scientist. That didn’t work out, but he is now semi-officially a Mad Scientist, which may even be better. You can find some of his work here.

Vandana Singh is an Indian speculative fiction writer born and raised in New Delhi. She lives in the Boston area, where she also teaches college physics and has published a children’s book:Younguncle Comes to Town (Viking 2006).

Anna Tambour currently lives in the Australian bush with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection, Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales &, and her novel,Spotted Lily, are Locus Recommended Reading List selections. Her website is Anna Tambour and Others and she blogs at medlarcomfits.blogspot.com.

Mikal Trimm has sold works of speculative fiction and poetry to a number of venues in the past few years. Recent or upcoming stories may be found in Weird Tales, Black Gate, Postscripts, Polyphony 6, and Shadowed Realms. He maintains a web presence (for no apparent reason) here.

Catherynne M. Valenteis the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth,Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She has been nominated for the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards as well as the Pushcart Prize. She was born in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Ohio with her two dogs.

Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning author who writes short stories, essays, and novels. Visit Whatworld.

Gillian Welch will release another CD and we will get the drinks in and crank up the music player (pre-apocalyse: some kind of electronic music machine; post-apocalypse: add some time for winding up the Victrola).

Until that long awaited day—and, hey, Gillian, if records and CDs and so on are no longer your thing, no worries!—NPR have posted a recording of her set at the Newport Folk Festival. No cover of “Black Star” this time, but enough to keep us happy. Besides, at the other end of the spectrum, the cover of “White Rabbit” is pretty decent.

Also available on that site: a whole lot of good stuff (surrounded by many so-so’s. No doubt YMMV).

Kelly Link’s debut collection, Stranger Things Happen, was a Firecracker nominee, a Village Voice Favorite Book and a SalonBook of the Year — Salon called the collection “…an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Stories from the collection have won the Nebula, the James Tiptree Jr., and the World Fantasy Awards.

Her second collection,Magic for Beginners, was a Book Sense pick (and a Best of Book Sense pick); and selected for best of the year lists byTime Magazine, Salon, Boldtype, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Capitol Times. It was published in paperback by Harcourt.

Kelly has visited a number of schools and workshops including Stonecoast in Maine, Washington University, Yale, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, Brookdale Community College, Brookdale, NJ, Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC, the Imagination Workshop at Cleveland State University, New England Institute of Art & Communications, Brookline, MA, Clarion East at Michigan State University, Clarion West in Seattle, WA, and Clarion South in Brisbane, Australia.

Kelly lives in Northampton, MA. She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kelly and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, publish a twice-yearly zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet — as well as books — as Small Beer Press.

Special Award—Non-professional
Edith L. Crowe (for her work with The Mythopoeic Society)
John Klima (for Electric Velocipede)
Elise Matthesen (for setting out to inspire and for serving as inspiration for works of poetry, fantasy, and SF over the last decade through her jewelry-making and her “artist’s challenges.”)
Sean Wallace, Neil Clarke, & Nick Mamatas (for Clarkesworld)
Michael Walsh (for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books)

We just mailed out the last of the subscriber‘s copies of LCRW 24 (thanks to the amazing intern team of: Michael, Paul, Felice, Kristen, and Abram!) and subscribers did not in fact get the Spicy Maya bar we promised: instead we sent out the Firecracker because it is at once fantastic and also weird and wonderful. It’s a dark chocolate bar with chipotle (mm), salt (mmm), and popping candy. What?! Yes. Feeling the popping candy go off in the middle of the deep dark chocolate is like eating the stars at night.

We have one bar left then new subscribers will get something else. And sharp-eyed readers will note that in the pic to the right there is a coupon from Chuao Chocolatiers especially for LCRW subscribers for 20% off online purchases: LCRW and the unexpected extra chocolatey goodness bonus! We recommend moving phasers to Stock Up.

This zine was made in the spring and summer of 2009 by Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, Michael J. DeLuca, Sara Majka, Paul Bozzo, Kristen Evans, and Faune Albert, and put back from June to July by the best reason Gavin & Kelly have ever had: Ursula Annabel Link Grant, born February 23rd, 2009. Our deepest thanks go to everyone at Baystate Medical Center and the Ronald McDonald House in Springfield, Mass.

“I’ve only recently become something of a fan of LCRW; it’s a literary magazine with beautiful production values; impeccable layout and the guts of the thing are good too: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, a comic by Abby Denson, and quirky spot illos by Anna Sears. It’s made me want to start reading new short fiction again, and I’m always really excited when it appears in my mailbox because it’s never hit a wrong note with me. Lovely as ever (and congrats to Gavin & Kelly on their best reason to miss a deadline!)”
—Xerography Debt

Subscriptions: $5 per single issue or $20/4. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library and institutional subscriptions available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as an ebook through Fictionwise.com, smallbeerpress.com, and lulu.com, and (maybe some day) as a trade paperback from lulu.com/sbp.

The eloquence and poignancy of each of these stories astonished me. “The City of Peace,” alone, is enough to make one weep. But when read as a whole, Other Cities is not only harrowing, but exhilarating. It’s a fearless exploration into both the heart of darkness and the soul of hope. Here, despair and joy are neither opposites nor antagonists — but husband and wife, brother and sister, yin and yang. In these Cities of Humanity, you won’t meet one without meeting the other.

Unfortunately, I’m an atheist, so someone might accuse me of dishonest deity interjection (thus casting a cloud of doubt over the entire sentence). Another problem is that “My God, these are beautiful” is quite short . . . and a proper blurb, particularly for stories as fine as those in Other Cities, should be long enough to be quoted with ellipses . . . like so . . . thus suggesting that the blurber had so many good things to say that they wouldn’t all fit . . . and that some of the best ones had to be left out.

On the other hand, “My God, these are beautiful,” although blasphemous and short, is true and concise. It’s also an improvement over my first draft:

In the 1990s the world was blessed by the appearance of a damn fine magazine named Crank! Due to the usual reasons — ruinous distribution, incredibly high editorial and production standards, a serious lack of personal inherited wealth — it all came to an end with issue no. 8.

We managed to get our hands on some back issues and, being the generous folk we are, we’re offering them to yous folks. No overcharging, no handwringing, nothing but a damn fine read. $5 a pop (including shipping), any two for $9, any three for $13 (lucky for some…), etc., etc. If we can get the missing issues (No. 5 is sold out), we’ll put them up here, too. We’ll occasionally bring them to sell at book fairs or conventions, if that’s your thing.

Broken Mirrors Press also published a number of books. Again, these are the good stuff, high standards, good design, you’ll be more than happy. We think. We expect. We kind of hope. Anyway, browse away:

R. A. LaffertySinbad: The 13th Voyage$12Trade paperback, 158pp. As new.
“Lafferty is the ambassador dispatched to the Late 20th Century by Dr. Johnson and Benjamin Franklin, Socrates and St. Paul.”
— Gene Wolfe